A 360° view of an object provides a mechanism for a user to inspect an object from different angles as though the object were rotating around a fixed axis. Such views are often presented as a collection of photographs displayed as a video. In some cases, the user can control the speed of the video.
Such 360° views of objects are useful in many different contexts where it may be advantageous for a user to see physical objects from different angles. These views are often provided over the World Wide Web, via a website. Such web-based 360° views of objects may be presented via any suitable format, such as for example Adobe Flash or Javascript.
360° views of objects are often created with special equipment and settings, where the object is placed on a rotary platform that is connected to the shutter of a camera. As the platform rotates, the camera takes a picture. The frequency with which images are captured is usually dependent on the angular speed of the platform. In some cases, special lighting is needed to eliminate dark areas; also, the background is often made white so that the object is completely isolated from the environment.
However, even with a complete set of digital photographs covering a full rotation around an object, most existing technologies are unable to provide a full immersive 3D experience because of two main reasons: the need to have the object isolated from the background and the level of interactivity desired.
Furthermore, existing techniques for providing 360° views of objects generally consume large amounts of bandwidth, since significant amounts of data must be transmitted in order to provide a satisfactory user experience. The user experience relies on the number of frames generated; often, in order to provide a sufficiently high frame rate, the output must be a file with a huge size.
Furthermore, it is often difficult to make changes to a 360° view of an object, since changing one aspect or portion generally requires re-shooting the entire object again.
Furthermore, many existing techniques for providing a 360° view of an object introduce discontinuities when transitioning from one image to the next, which can detrimentally affect the immersive quality of the 360° view.